Walk out not up #walkoutnotup #walkoutandwalkup

There is nothing wrong with “walk out and walk up” because it expands consideration and activism in a good direction.

It says, “while you are busy protesting the fact that dozens of children and teachers are murdered in their schools per year — and good for you for doing this — note that in your suburban school system of 5,000 students, about one will die per year of their own hand, using Uncle Bob’s Glock that he keeps on his night stand just in case.”

There is a great deal wrong with “walk out NOT walk up” because it is bone headed self aggrandizing yammering about how wrong people are in their ability to perceive things, and their tone, which in and of itself is wrong.

I’ll give you the short version of why #walkoutnotup is #wrongandstupid here, and point you to a longer post I wrote a few weeks ago, seeing this tone trolling coming, because it does, always, come.

The concern and tone trolls live in all the woodwork from which they will always emanate all the time.

In this case we are being asked to tone down the protest of gun massacres in schools. We are told that school shootings are very rare compared to other gun deaths, including suicide.

This is actually true and a good point, but in truth, that has nothing to do with school shootings being horrific and something we very much want to stop.

If there was a specific sort of event that caused the occasional traffic death, say a really badly designed intersection, to the tune of a dozen to 30 a year, we would not say, “this means nothing because the other traffic deaths are myriad!” If it was a bad intersection, we would freakin’ fix the intersection!

(Also, I note that school shootings are part of a somewhat larger “mass shooting” category which is probably internally homogeneous enough that we should think of them together, which does bump up the numbers by about 300-400%. But I digress)

Anyway, here’s the thing, something you likely did not know. Both suicides and a good number of single or mass shootings, including many if not all school shootings, and many domestic violence related killings, are allowed to occur because of commonalities among all of these different forms of violence and mayhem vis-a-vis guns.

Some of this emerges from our gun culture, or more accurately, our widespread fetish of gun culture (to the extent that people who don’t love guns bow down to the right of gun ownership no matter how many die from gun shots being more important than safety). We don’t look down on people who own assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammo, and bump stocks. We stand back (really far back if we’re smart) and acknowledge the sacredness of their Constitutionally protected ownership of killing machines. We are not shocked when a deadly crime happens and reporters and investigators don’t even question, and rarely report about, the source of the gun, who owned it, was it locked up, etc.

Gun culture protects the ownership and use of guns, as long as the user is sufficiently white, much like the patriarchy protects boys being boys and widespread religious practice protects rapists in the church.

(These are all things that are changing, of course. Slowly.)

Some of this emerges from legislative and agency inaction in demanding that dangerous weapons be hard to get (to own) and hard to get (to grab off a shelf and employed to kill and wound others), which in itself is buttressed by the fetish of gun culture.

The undue respect for guns and gun ownership, the lack of will to impede ownership, the culturally received assumption that we should not ask gun owners to keep their guns out of the hands of children and children killers, and so on, allows for a much higher than necessary rate of gun death through suicide, domestic violence, a handful of other homicide scenarios, and a good number of mass shootings including and especially school shootings.

Bottom line: Many of the things we would do to reduce suicide apply to gun related homicide in general, to mass shootings in general, and to school shootings in general.